Recently my phone broke and I decided to reset my anki from scratch because I didn't want to deal with the backlog that I had accumulated in the meantime. For a while I was really enjoying the drop in daily study time and subsequently adding only like 5 or so words a day, even though I could have often added more. But then I soon grew disgusted with what felt like a sense of complacency and went back to adding almost any word I encountered that I didn't know, as well as words that I had learned in the past but had pretty much forgotten. Now I am beginning to once again see the writing on the wall, that ahead of me is probably a few more years of about another 1-1.5 hours a day of daily anki reviews as I try to crawl my way past a few thousand more words towards a vocab of 20k, then 25k, and then perhaps 30k god forbid.
I began learning Japanese simply because I started to live in Japan with my Japanese spouse and not knowing the language seemed like a waste of potential. However the process of conquering the language word by word has become it's own sort of addiction, and somewhat divorced from any of the original goals. As I somewhat alluded to earlier, perhaps theres an irrational fear of becoming complacent with my current level, and further vocabulary aquisition can seem like an easily quantifiable step towards mastery. However, at the same time I do also feel like I meet so many Japanese people who's English is stagnate at this pseudo fluent, semi-advanced level because they simply lack enough vocabulary / phrase knowledge to push them over the edge towards a more meaninful fluency, and I don't want that for myself (as I've hustled wayyy too hard just to get up to this point to not see my efforts bloom to a greater fruition).
I don't know if I have any 1 question in particular, but I really want to know about the experiences of people who have put in a great deal of effort to blow up their raw knowledge of the language, and to what extent it has had an impact on their life/use of the language (whether it be input or output) outside of the confines of the descreet activity of studying the language in and of itself. Has there been a meaningful sense of connection between the labor and the reward? What sort of time scale was required to reach important milestones deeper in a language learners journey? Any regrets, or atleast thoughts on how time could have been more intelligently spent?
EDIT: I'm going to add this because I seem to be getting 90% responses that are lectures about stuff that seriously have nothing to do with what I wrote. I guess this means I should have provided more background info.
Please don't assume that other forms of practice are not being done (output/listening) in a meaninful way along with vocab aquisition simply because this post is focused on the topic of vocab aquisition and the effects of it. Also, please don't assume that vocab aquisition is being done in such a shallow way that it is inapplicable (even just as input), or at the very least, doesn't provide a basis to become applicable in the future as words are encountered more and the context for their use broadens.
by Ok_Demand950